Robert Howe

Robert Howe (1732-14 December 1786) was a Major-General of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.

Biography
Robert Howe was born in 1732 in New Hanover County, North Carolina to a prominent family in the colony. Howe served in the French and Indian War as the commander of Fort Johnston at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, and he served under William Tryon during the 1765-1771 War of the Regulation, a tax uprising in the state of North Carolina that was crushed by Governor Tryon and the colonial authorities. Howe was good friends with Tryon, but he was hostile to his successor as Governor of North Carolina, Josiah Martin, leading to him siding with the patriots during the American Revolutionary War instead of the Tories, the side that Tryon chose. Howe served as a member of the North Carolina Provincial Congress and became a militia commander during the war of independence, and he was promoted to Brigadier-General at the start of the war. Howe saw action in the southern theater, failing to defend Savannah from Archibald Campbell's army in 1778. Howe was stripped from his command of the southern theater due to rumors of him being a womanizer, and his duel with Christopher Gadsden sealed the deal for him. Howe served under George Washington in the Hudson Highlands, and he did not have a significant career in that theater, apart from a skirmish at Verplanck's Point shortly after the Battle of Stony Point in 1779. Howe would help in the quelling of the New Jersey and Pennsylvania regiments' mutinies, and he returned home in 1783, dying in 1786 while en route to a North Carolina House of Commons session.